Kofi Versus Clausewitz
By gunslinger Posted in Spotlight Blogs | User Blogs — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Kofi Annan's statement before the U.N. Security Council this evening was mostly unobjectionable. Sure, he singled out Israel first, but eventually he got around to wagging his finger at Hezbollah. At the U.N., that counts as iconoclasm. He could have done much worse and gotten away with it.
He lost me towards the end, however, when he quoted Clausewitz:
The parallel crises in Lebanon and Gaza over the past few weeks have demonstrated, once again, that there are no military solutions to this conflict. War is not, and I repeat, war is not “the continuation of politics by other means”. On the contrary, it represents a catastrophic failure of political skill and imagination – a dethronement of peaceful politics from the primacy which it should enjoy.
And a little further on:
Only political solutions will be sustainable in the long term. The peace treaties between Israel and Egypt, and between Israel and Jordan, are expressions of stable political arrangements and agreements.
Sorry, but no. I won't claim to have read On War, but it seems to me that Israel's history actually validates Clausewitz's most famous quotation. Egypt and Jordan accepted peace only after Israel repeatedly demonstrated its military dominance in the region. Even today, the U.N. would have been happy to see its own Resolution 1559 perpetually unfulfilled if Israel hadn't chosen "politics by other means."
No doubt about it, peaceful politics should enjoy a position of primacy. But this postulate only works as a formula for relations between states when shared by all sides. It can't address non-state entities such as Hezbollah which actively reject peace. Such entities may enter into political accommodations from time to time, but only so long as they advance their overarching goals. We saw this in 2000 when Arafat reignited the intifadah after perceiving that diplomacy would bring him no closer to destroying Israel.
Hezbollah understands our desire for politcal resolutions all too well and uses it against us. Not being an actual state, it is less constrained by political arrangements. In the end, it's actually Hezbollah that turns Clausewitz on his head: for them, politics is a continuation of war by other means.
the motives slight and tensions low, a prudent general may look for any way to avoid major crises and decisive actions,----and finally reach a peaceful settlement." Von Clausewitz
Maybe we should ask Napolean Annan if any of those conditions pertain, or did pertain. Hell, the man isn't even a good diplomat himself, but he's one super gangster.
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville